


Five Times Micah Died (And One Time He Lived)

by waitforhightide



Series: The Real Unholy Trinity [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: (but it doesn't stick), 5 Things, 5+1 Things, Apocalypse, Car Accidents, M/M, Murder, Other, Self-Harm, Songfic, Suicide, The Real Unholy Trinity, Time Loop, apocalypse boyfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 03:05:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16210079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waitforhightide/pseuds/waitforhightide
Summary: The boys are stuck in a time loop and Micah is the linchpin. He fucks up a lot before he gets it right.





	Five Times Micah Died (And One Time He Lived)

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of The Real Unholy Trinity universe that I've been writing on and off with [CactusFlowers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CactusFlowers/pseuds/CactusFlowers) and [crypticbarmpot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crypticbarmpot/pseuds/crypticbarmpot) for like 6 years. This piece is all mine, but Lucian belongs to Cactus and Julian belongs to Cryptic.
> 
> The only background you really need is Luc is a vessel for Lucifer, Jules is the literal Antichrist, and Micah is a (possibly false) prophet, which makes them the harbingers of the apocalypse, especially if they have any say in it.

> _ When my time comes around _ __   
>  _ Lay me gently in the cold dark earth _ __   
>  _ No grave can hold my body down _ __   
>  _ I'll crawl home to her _ __   
>  __   
>  _ My baby never fret none _ __   
>  _ About what my hands and my body done _ _   
>  _ _ If the lord don't forgive me _ _   
>  _ __ I'd still have my baby and my babe would have me
> 
> _ Hozier, "Work Song"  _
> 
>  

**_one._ **

The room is spinning. It’s hard to get his eyes to focus, but out of his peripheral vision—which is pulsing red with his heartbeat, is that bad? It’s probably bad—he can see the scrawl of permanent marker across his formerly cream-colored bedroom walls. The three-headed beast with his friends faces on it seems to move, as if it’s shouting from the plaster and paint. 

How much blood did he have to lose before the goddamn voices fucking  _ stopped? _

Apparently a lot. 

They are still talking to him. Sometimes he thinks he recognizes them. Other times, not so much. 

His phone vibrates, inches from his left hand where he had held it as be bled, reading the messages he had saved from his friends. 

**Lucian:** _ You’re a good guy, Micah.  _

**Jules:** _yeah man if anyone was getting into the Good Afterlife when you died it would be you, fuck what your mom says._

The voices are laughing at him when he dies.

  
  


**_two._ **

He cashes in the jars of change his mother hoards all over the house and buys a bus ticket. It takes him weeks, but he does it a pickle jar at a time, so that Tammy won’t notice. At the end of it all, with the help of some scrounging for cans and a few incidents of theft from his mother’s wallet, he manages to scrape together almost $400—twice as much as he had expected and more than enough to cover a one-way ticket to Minneapolis.

He considers going to Columbus. Strongly. But there is no chance he could show up at Lucian's family home. The streets of Minneapolis are a different story.

On a morning in April, he throws himself into a whirlwind of transportation. First, a cab from his town to the next town. A stolen bicycle, left serendipitously unlocked in front of a library, to the train station. (He leaves a note tied to the handle with where he stole it and hides a $20 bill under the seat; he hopes it will find its way back to its owner). A train from Rhinecliff to Poughkeepsie. A train from Poughkeepsie to New York City.

The city is loud, brash, and oppressive. It stirs up the silt in his brain, clouding his thoughts like river water. He leaves the relative brightness of Grand Central to a corner bodega, where he pulls his wad of change-jar money out of a jeans pocket and peels off an astounding $20 for a pack of cigarettes and a plain white lighter.

He doesn’t notice the man follow him out until the hand falls onto his shoulder and he jumps.

“Eeeeyyyy man, gotta light?”

Micah turns around. There is a man in baggy clothes, a black knit cap, and a tangled beard over a mostly-toothless mouth where an unlit cigarette bobbs in time with his words. 

“Oh, yeah, I—” Micah reaches into his jeans pocket awkwardly, squeezing around the hip strap of his backpack. When he draws his hand out of his pocket, his clumsy money roll follows it. “Fuck, hold on—”

He never sees the man’s eyes light up. He never sees the knife.

He finally dies in an alley mere seconds after his bus pulls out of the garage, bound for Ohio, thinking,  _ man, I never even fucking got to smoke a goddamn cigarette _ . For a moment, he is standing, once again, in the bright lobby with the clocks and the ticket booths, but without the commuters. A tall, thin person with dark eyes, a long braid, and a red and gold sari approaches him. “You’re not supposed to be here yet,” ey say, sounding annoyed. Micah tries to speak and finds he cannot. The person rolls eir eyes. “ _ Julian _ , get it right this time.” Micah thinks his friend’s name sounds more like an epithet on the person’s lips than a name.

 

**_three._ **

This time around (not that he know yet that there have been other times) he makes it far enough to see them, and they are in a shitty car that Luc or Jules probably stole and they are driving through Ohio and fuck, who ever thought Ohio would be beautiful? But Jules is driving with one hand and Lucian is reading a well-worn book in the backseat and Micah is watching the sun set out the passenger side window. He has stolen the aux cord over everyone’s objections, and he trusts them enough to let the armor slip, to play something soft, like the dust motes drifting over the wheatfields in the distance. 

The car swerves and Jules laughs. Micah’s head snaps around and sees Jules has traded one hand on that damn steering wheel knob-thing for both knees pressed to the wheel as he tears open a bag of chips. Suddenly the golden light of the sunset is gone, replaced by the red-black pulse of Micah’s tunnel vision and the tell-tale whispers that precede a vision.

“Jules—” he says through his distress. Jules laughs.

“Look ma, no hands!” he crows proudly. Lucian chuckles from the back seat and when Micah turns to look at him, half of his face is missing and Micah can see brain through his bashed in skull. He thinks he will vomit, turns to Jules to make him pull over, has no desire to vomit on his lap, but Jules is slumped back against the seat, eyes unfocused, tongue lolling out of a bloody, foaming mouth, and Micah lunges for the steering wheel.

The voices are persistent; he is sure he hears both Luc and Jules shouting at him as he yanks the dumb black knob hard to the right, even though they are dead, died somewhere in the golden sunset without Micah even noticing—

The car skids roughly from the highway, hits a ditch, rolls twice and lands upside down. Lucian, never one to impede comfort, has not been wearing his seatbelt and he is thrown around the sedan like a ragdoll. His head hits the half-open backseat window at just the right angle to tear the skin from one side of his face and break open his skull. Jule’s head whips back and one of the metal posts from the shitty, broken headrest impales him in the base of the neck. He is brain-dead before the car even stops moving.

Micah dangles upside down and somehow manages to undo his seatbelt, even though he’s sure that isn’t supposed to happen. He is screaming their names. Jules does not answer, but there is a rasped breath from behind him and he crawls across the ceiling of the car until he is with Lucian, holding his spasming hand.

“I fucked it up, Luc,” Micah cries. There is a stabbing pain in his back, near his shoulder. Perhaps he dislocated it when he dropped from his seat. “Luc, I’m sorry, I fucked it up, I fucked it up.”

Lucian’s functional eye swivels to look at Micah. His lips twitch in what might be a kind of a smile. “Not… fault,” he breathes. There is blood in his mouth. Micah finds one of Lucian’s hands and he is kissing the knuckles.

“I fucked up, I fucked up.”

“‘S always…. Next time…” Luc rasps. Micah has no idea what he’s talking about. With surprising strength, he grabs Micah by the shirt and pulls him close. Micah smells blood and shit and gasoline. Is something burning? Lucian’s lips press to his forehead. “I… forgive you,” he says.

By the time the car burns, Micah has dragged Jules to be with them as well. Their ashes mingle in the corn fields.

  
  


**_four._ **

The house is narrow and old and sometimes the power goes out, but Micah loves it. He knows that they will leave soon—Luc is gone more often and Jules laughs whenever Micah mentions any time-frame longer than a few weeks—but for now, he loves it. 

Usually.

Then there are nights like this, when Luc is gone somewhere and Jules has been holed up in his room for hours and Micah hasn’t spoken to a living soul since lunch. The internet is down again and so he can’t even watch Netflix on the ChromeCast in the living room. He’s read every book in the house by now and he can only imagine the derision he would face from the others  if he was caught signing up for a library card with the duplex listed as his address. Still, he has checked every app on his phone twelve times and beat 2048 twice, and has seen neither hide nor hair of his friends.

He realizes the sun has finally set at the same time he notices the glow that flashes on-off-on against the wall of the staircase. From the accompanying curses, he can only assume it’s related to whatever Jules has been working on up there, alone. 

After a short internal debate, Micah ascends the stairs, careful of the rough wood under his bare feet. He finds that Jules’ door is slightly ajar, and peeks in.

There is a black-purple light around Jules’ hands. He is staring at it with his brow furrowed. Godric, his snake, is on the floor in front of him and appears to also be watching intently. The light is shifting, changing form, and Micah can’t tell if Jules is encouraging it or fighting against it. At first it is the size of a softball, then a football, then a basketball. It shrinks then, back through the progression until it is golf-ball sized again. It does this several times, and the intense and uncharacteristic expression of concentration on Jules’ face never wavers.  _ I’ve never seen him this focused on anything, _ Micah thinks. 

Suddenly, the light flashes a bright red and grows to half the size of the room. Forgetting himself, Micah shouts in surprise and slips against the doorframe. The door swings open into Jules’ room. Jules’ head snaps around just in time to see Micah. He shouts and the ball of light continues to expand, until red is all Micah can see. He hears Jules’ voice—“Oh, balls! Not  _ again _ , you nosey mother _ fucker _ !”—and then nothing.

  
  


**_five._ **

Lucian stands before him, but it is not Lucian. Jules has come up with a phrase for Lucian’s in-between moments, when he was neither Luc nor Lucifer— _ Lux _ . A crossing. An uncertainty.

This is not Lux.

“God fucking dammit, Micah,” Lucifer breathes. “What have you done?”

There is blood on Micah’s hands, in his hair. He can feel it on his torn t-shirt. He tastes metal on his tongue—is that blood, too, or only terror? Paul, the leader of the cult, slumps dead and cold in the corner of his office. There is darkness pulsing in the corners of Micah’s vision. The whispers slide over each other like the rasp of the sheets on Lucian’s skin.

“I didn’t want to,” Micah says. Is he speaking out loud? Does it matter? Probably not. If anyone can hear his thoughts, it’s the Light Bringer, isn’t it? “Lu— He tried—”

Lucifer’s skin—Lucian’s skin, with Lucifer’s intent—is cool on his face. His lips are soft, patient. Micah kisses him as if Lucifer is air and Micah is drowning, is trapped in a house fire, is halfway to the moon with nothing around him. Lucifer—Lucian—Lux’s tongue is sliding along his jaw, licking the blood from his face. Micah doesn’t mind. He twines his hands into Luc’s hair, staining it pink with Paul’s blood.

“I’m sorry,” Micah say, the words rasping in his throat. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“So am I, Micah,” Lucifer says. He pulls back from Micah’s neck where he has left bite marks that are already bruising. “I really hoped I didn’t have to do this this time around.”

His fist punches through skin and muscle, and up through Micah’s diaphragm like wet tissue paper. Then, suddenly, there is a look of horror on Lucian’s face.

“Micah, no,” he moans. He looks at his arm, buried up the elbow in torn and bloody flesh, and winces. He doesn’t try to move.

“I k-k…. I killed Paul,” Micah says.

“I know. Lucifer, he—we need Paul, he says we can’t go on without him.”

“What about m-m-me?”

“You’re the anchor point,” Lucian says. This means nothing to Micah. “Lucifer says… he says when you die, we get to try again. We loop.”

“I didn’t… didn’t m-m-mean t-to,” he manages, and he swears he feels Lucian’s fist against his lungs when he tries to breathe.

“I know, kid, I know,” Luc says. “It’s not your fault. We’ve done this before. I see it sometimes, in the blackouts. I don’t remember a lot, but Lucifer does. Sometimes he lends the memories to me.” He smiles weakly. “I’ve seen you do way worse. One time, early on, you killed me. Crashed the damn car.” He is quiet for a moment, his left arm quivering with the weight of Micah’s body. “I gotta let go now, Micah. I’ll see you next time around.”

“I killed someone, I—”

“It doesn’t matter. We’ve all killed people somewhere in the loops.”

“Luc—”

“Sorry Micah. It’s time to go. I promise, you’ll find us again.”

  
  


**_six._ **

The building seems much higher now that he’s standing on top of it. The wind, barely noticeable from the ground, whips his hair around his face. He realizes it has grown long since he left New York.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asks his friends. Jules pats him roughly on the back.

“Of course it is! Paul is giving his press conference about the cult down there.” Jules points down what seems like an impossible distance, to where people scurry like ants around news vans that can’t be bigger than a soda can. “When you fall and you  _ don’t die, _ it’ll prove to all his cronies that we’re telling the truth, and that we are who we say we are. Then we have the energy we need.” There is an unusual hunger on Jules’ usually playful face. “Can you imagine what we can do once our parlor tricks don’t drain us? How well you’ll be able to see the future, how far I’ll be able to teleport us? And not to mention Lux—I mean Lucifer. With enough power from believers, he said he’ll leave our good buddy Luc here all to himself and find a better way to—what was it? ‘Cross ethereal planes of existence’?” He falls silent and there is a faraway look in his eyes for a moment before he snaps back to himself. He looks almost guiltily at Micah. Micah has a feeling that, for the first time, he may have glimpsed the Antichrist hiding in his class clown of a friend.

“Besides,” Lucian chimes in. “If you  _ do _ die, we know we fucked up somewhere along the line and we’ll just have to reset anyway.”

“Comforting,” Micah mutters. “What happens to you guys when I die, anyway?”

Luc shrugs. “Lucifer doesn’t usually share the memories of the other cycles. He just tells me they exist. From the few times you and I have caught glimpses of the same stuff, I assume he’s telling the truth.”

“We live,” Jules says shortly. He is still looking out over the Dallas skyline, as if he is searching for something. “Until we die. And then we just come back again. As babies. Until we meet each other.”

Micah isn’t sure what to say about that. The silence is thick and unbroken until Jules breaks whatever reverie he was in. “Anyway!” he says brightly. “Luc and I will head downstairs. When you hear your phone ring, that’s when you jump. Okay?”

Jules and Luc turn to leave down the series of fire escapes before Micah has a chance to answer.

It feels like he’s alone on the roof for hours, shivering a little as the wind picks up. Isn’t it always supposed to be warm in Texas? Why the fuck does he feel like his snot is going to freeze? Will it be even colder on the way down, with 33 stories to fall before he hits the pavement? Will he hit the ground? A car? People?

Will he land on his friends?

His phone rings, and he realizes it’s the ringtone he set for Lucian in a moment of sentimentality. He never thought he would actually hear it; they never call each other, only text in rare moments when they are not together anyway. Hozier’s deep, Irish voice sounds small and tinny in his pocket.

 

> __ Boys workin' on empty  
>  _ Is that the kinda way to face the burning heat?  
>  _ _ I just think about my baby  
>  _ __ I'm so full of love I could barely eat
> 
>  

He takes a deep breath and runs.  _ Don’t trip, _ he thinks madly.  _ Don’t trip, don’t trip— _ When he reaches the lip at the end of the roof, he vaults it like a gymnast. He has a moment to wonder if he’ll roll his ankle when he lands before he remembers he won’t be landing, at least not like he normally would. 

He falls and thinks of roller coasters, of parachutes, of birds, and then of none of those things. The ant people are cockroach people, then mouse people, then dog people, and then he sees faces, whites of eyes, individual hairs blowing in the Texas spring wind—

He lands four feet to the left of Paul’s impromptu press-conference. His neck snaps. When his head rotates, he sees Luc and Jules leaning nonchalantly against a streetlight. Jules winks at him. People are screaming, he can tell eyes and cameras alike are turning to look at his broken body on the concrete.

He finds he can move his hands, gets them beneath his chest, pushes himself up off the sidewalk, feels the gravel embedded in his palms. He cracks his neck like he fell asleep wrong on the couch; people around him are too scared to do more than gasp. The screams, he thinks, will come later. He feels people near him, realizes Jules and Lucian are coming to stand at his shoulders.  _ This is it. I’m the prophet now. Front and center. _ The ring of horrified observers has become a semicircular audience. Micah wants to touch his face, to see if it’s all still there, but he doesn’t dare. Instead, he turns to face the cameras. 

“I’m alive,” he says to the cameras. “And it’s not because of Paul Sangano’s cult. It’s because I am the Prophet Micah.” He reaches to either side, finds Luc and Jules’ hands, and has an intense  _ deja vu _ —dead in New York City, dead in Ohio, dead, dead, dead—and it rolls off of him. 

“I am the Prophet Micah, and I am here to save the world.”

**Author's Note:**

> My writing blog is [whereitglows.tumblr.com](http://whereitglows.tumblr.com)
> 
> Find me on twitter [@crashmargulies_](http://twitter.com/crashmargulies_) or instagram [@crashmargulies](http://instagram.com/crashmargulies) if you want?


End file.
